Guide for Including a Generalist Repository in an NIH Data Management and Sharing Plan

This resource has been prepared by the seven generalist repositories (Dataverse, Dryad, Figshare, OSF, Mendeley Data, Vivli, and Zenodo) participating in the NIH Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI) to address components of NIH Data Management and Sharing Plans (DMS Plans) that may include sharing data and other materials in generalist repositories. This guide should be used in combination with other resources on data management and sharing best practices more broadly, and the guidance here may also be generally applicable to data sharing in other non-GREI repositories.

Generalist repositories like the GREI repositories are trusted repositories that meet the NIH Desirable Characteristics for Data Repositories and offer maximum flexibility as they accept data, and, in some cases, other research outputs, regardless of discipline or format.

While discipline-specific repositories should be used whenever available and may even be required by specific NIH Programs or for specific data types, generalist repositories (and similarly flexible institutional repositories) offer a trusted repository option to share research data and may even be used in combination with other repositories.

This document addresses five of the six elements of an NIH DMS Plan. We have not included guidance on Element 6: Oversight of Data Management and Sharing because it is entirely specific to your institution.

We have provided the DMS Plan guide as both an ineractive PDF and as an OpenDocument (.odt) text file to facilitate reuse. 

We invite users to give feedback on this resource via the GREI GitHub discussion board.